


degrees and decimeters

by leradny



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-01-19
Packaged: 2018-05-14 21:46:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5760034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leradny/pseuds/leradny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey learns from Luke.</p>
            </blockquote>





	degrees and decimeters

Something Rey does not learn--or rather, comprehend--until well into her Jedi training is the difference between the Dark side and the Light.

She hears Luke say ‘Be considerate to all beings’ and thinks it means she is to be gentle at all times.

Yet:

Along with meditation, Master Luke teaches her lightsaber combat, having collected and studied very, very old records of training duels from all seven styles of lightsaber combat. There are several words for cutting off a limb. And they are Jedi techniques.

There is one moment when Master Luke takes a stone and throws it into the sea one day. He explains that he was angry, and leaves it at that one short phrase. She does not ask for the reason, and Luke is not forthcoming with it. On one of her visits to the base where Finn is still going through physical rehab, she seeks out the General and tells her of Luke’s anger.

“What day was this?” Rey answers the question, and the General nods. “That was the day his uncle and aunt died.”

Jedi can feel, Rey marvels. His anger was gone as quickly as it had come, but it was there.

\- - -

Rey sees Master Luke pulling up weeds in the garden he grows for food. She wonders why, if the Jedi respect all life, he does this. And it burns Rey somewhat, to see even a fraction of green tossed into a garbage heap.

Luke’s back is to her, but he senses her discomfort, her skin prickling with memories of the burning sand and of a vase full of flowers. He sets the trowel aside and pats her shoulder with his flesh hand, clumps of sod still clinging to it. A young blond man with both hands, bright blue eyes, and an even brighter smile flashes in his place. Rey sees Luke trudging across a desert of his own, lit by two suns, and Rey wipes away a tear she hadn’t known was falling.

“The weeds are stronger than my vegetables. They come back every year, without any care or encouragement on my part. If the weeds in this garden were left to their own devices, they would choke the plants I had sown from their beds, and I would starve. I do what I must to maintain balance and nothing more.”

If Rey had not known that she asked this question herself, on a whim, she would have wondered if Master Luke had planned this.

Her master looks down at the heap, and gives a lopsided smile. “They make excellent fertilizer.”

Rey looks down at the vegetables, and picks up the spade. Desert plants can live on their own for weeks without attention, but Master Luke tends to his garden every day.

\- - -

They meditate next to each other in the mornings, on many matters.

Rey comes to this:

A difference in emotion for the Light Side is measured in degrees, decimeters, the skin of one’s teeth. At least with Master Luke--at his age, if not when he was younger. Rey had touched the metal hand once, and heard a young man screaming in pain, both physical and mental. She wonders if that is why he always reaches out to her with his flesh hand. If he had learned this after his prior padawans sensed the pain and anguish lingering between his wrist and his metal hand.

Master Luke as he is these days can frown, smile, shed a tear. It is as real and genuine as any of Kylo Ren’s searing rages. Perhaps he leans more towards a soft touch, yet at the same time he is too distant to be personal, to be gentle. And always, her master pauses to contemplate himself, and the moment is swept away. His emotions may spur his actions, but he never loses control. What he does is reasonable, logical, adheres to rules.

Master Luke is as mild as the island they train on. There are no storms here. But there are no days as bright as she remembers on Jakku.

During meditation, Rey recalls her interrogation by Kylo Ren. How he had never touched her. The soothing caress of his voice. She remembers wondering how such gentleness could come from a man who held a lightsaber to her throat in the forest.

And then Rey thinks of the desert, as she does so often now that she is many star systems away from Jakku. The desert has no middle ground--sunshine that kills in the daytime quickly lifts away to black nights that freeze the unwary to death.

She had panicked the first few nights on the island. Master Luke had given her one thick blanket which would never have kept out freezing cold, until she learned that the night was only a fraction colder than the sunshine.

Rey knows the desert well, how to survive.

She wonders if her knowledge can apply to surviving Kylo Ren.

Master Luke opens his eyes.

“It is not ourselves we must protect from Kylo Ren, at the end of it all. To do that, we could run until he exhausted himself, and that is a very simple matter. No–it is Ben we must save.”

Rey remembers how Kylo Ren had pounded on his wounds instead of bandaging them, how he had ignored all the injuries he had received in battle to keep fighting, at the cost of his mobility. Even when she’d slashed his face, beaten him down so he lay there with his lifeblood seeping into the snow, his mind was still aflame. Completely irrational.

Rey understands.

She gets up at dawn, the same as usual, but she is mindful of the shoulder she’d wrenched the other day.

Master Luke puts her in front of a tree, trimmed so that four rows of branches stick out evenly in a cross.

He tells her to cut off one branch, and no more.

The branches are neat, but close to each other, one right below the other.

Rey ignites and lifts the fore end of her lightstaff, always remembering the other end’s distance from the ground. She lowers it, slowly, to the top of the right-side branch. Applies pressure so she can cut through the bough. Her shoulder protests and jerks at the slow movement, but she stops her blade just before she touches the bough underneath it. The cleanly severed one falls to the soft grass beneath. Rey withdraws her light staff (always remember the back end), turns it off, and looks at Master Luke.

“You have completed the exercise. Can you explain to me what the purpose was?”

“It is better to speak than to wound. But it is better to wound than to kill. Control is of the essence. I may cause injury if it will avoid worse injury, but I should not cause unnecessary pain.”

“Very good.”

Luke nods, and Rey feels the warmth of his pride.

“Thank you, Master.”

She recalls that this move is used to sever the weapon hand of another lightsaber wielder. Better to--to slice off the limb of a raving lunatic than to let him run unchecked. Or, perhaps a wound had gotten infected, and a lightsaber was the only tool for amputation nearby.

Luke senses the shift in Rey’s thoughts. While he sobers with her, his pride grows the slightest hair more.

**Author's Note:**

> you can [follow me on tumblr](http://www.thegrayship.tumblr.com) as i am way more active there.


End file.
